I would like to draw a dramatic picture of two concurrent scenes, here, of the events taking place at two so-widely-separated spots. In the physics lab of Collins University, away back in the twentieth century, I sat. Joe had gone plodding over to a hardware store to buy a hank of sash cord. I wouldn’t trust to the string that had sufficed for Norton. I sat in the dusty, hot laboratory, listening to the buzzing of a fly, and Norton, snoring off in the corner, and the gay laughter of bespectacled schoolteachers being charming and girlish out on the campus. All was peace. All was tranquility. I was genuinely thrilled by what had happened to Norton and was about to happen to me, but I didn’t know Ginny was in my immediate future. If I had, I’d have been in a hurry.
And far, far away in time, you, Charles, scowlingly led a gay party down into your family’s rumpus-room. Its walls glowed faintly with the changing forms and movements of the dynamic decorations. You picked out those decorations, and they are pretty corny. That sequence in which a spacesuited figure with your face slaughters grymvals—the batlike things with jet propulsion—while a rather sappy-looking blonde watches admiringly. That smacks of vainglory, but let it go.
You showed them the rumpus-room, conspicuously bereft of me. Laki—a nice girl, Laki, if you go for brunettes—giggled excitedly.
Stan poured coins cheerfully from one hand to another to show you how dumb you were not to be on a sure thing straight from your great-etc.-grandfather’s own lips. Hari jingled coins, a bit rueful for not having bet with more nerve. And Ginny waited radiantly to see the man whom she knew from this letter was going to take her back to the strange, remote, primitive days when pictures were two-dimensional and all the food that people ate was grown in fields right here on Earth.
Ginny wore green, with a necklace of glittering synthetic stones—not valuable, only carbon crystals—about her neck. Her tiny feet—but why should I describe Ginny to you, Charles? You’ve seen her, and you probably have a hard enough time following these ideas without being disconcerted by Ginny. The marvelous thing about Ginny was her superb confidence of knowing exactly how I was going to feel about her (indirectly, in my own clever way, I’m telling her now) plus the satisfaction that I did not know anything about it yet. Because, of course, when all this happens, none of it will have taken place so far as I am concerned—if you grasp my meaning—and I’m going to write this letter afterward, but Ginny is going to read it ahead of time. I tenderly hope this doesn’t make you dizzy, Charles. You will need to be your usual, absent-minded self. A tense pause occurred.
Back in the physics laboratory Joe returned with the sash cord. There were more cries of merry laughter out on the campus. Flies buzzed on and Norton dreamed of cocktails and sardine canapes. All was peace. The world trundled on, unaware of the unparalleled and never-to-be-duplicated event about to take place.
It was a tense moment indeed. We prepared for my splendid journey. I cut off a length of sash cord. Then I felt Joe hauling at my belt. He was tying the other end of the sash cord to it. He’d accomplished it when I realized. But I objected. I would trust my pants to a belt, but not my life. I hadn’t lost my nerve, but I wasn’t going to take any unnecessary chances, either. I tied my end of the sash cord around my ankle with a firm, double-knotted diamond hitch.
Then I said, “Tie the other end to something, Joe.”
I watched him tie the cord’s end firmly to a steam-radiator.
I felt prickles down my spine, but I said, “I will not let Norton lead where I dare not follow! Let’er go, Joe!”
And Joe retreated to the extension-cord switch. He gulped, and looked unhappy, and threw the switch over.
He and the laboratory, the floor, the ceiling, the steam-radiator and all the world I knew, vanished in a luminous puce-colored mist. I stood still. Nothing happened. There I was. Apparently, that was all there was to it. About me there was merely a brownish-purple nothing-in-particular. There was no sound or movement of any sort. True, I no longer heard the glad cries of the summer-session school-teachers on the campus, but aside from a feeling that I’d crawled into a puce-colored hole and pulled it in after me, there was no sensation at all. I thought to look for the beer-bottle that had vanished permanently. I did not see it. I did not see anything. I might as well be nowhere. I very probably was.
It did not strike me as high adventure. It did not really strike me as anything at all. I was distinctly disappointed. I began to wish that Joe would haul on the sash cord tied to my ankle and get me out. Of course I could have walked off in the mist to see if it was different anywhere else, but I had an innate conviction that I’d better stay where I was. At that point I was very calm, Charles. Extremely calm. But as minute after minute passed by and absolutely nothing happened, I began to sweat slightly.
I endured it as long as I could, and then I bent down and picked up the sash cord tied to my leg. I waggled it, as a signal to Joe to pull me out of wherever I was, if anywhere. He did not respond. I pulled on the cord, to stretch it taut so Joe would recognize that it was time for him to do something practical.
It didn’t get taut. Because here, my dear Charles, I was faced with a small error of judgment on my own part. But it was an error over which I shall rejoice forever. It was an inspired fuzzy-mindedness which brought about the rest. When Joe and I were preparing for me to vanish in a puce-colored mist, Charles, Joe had prepared to fasten the sash cord to my belt. It was not an especially sound idea, but I bless him for it. At the time, though, I’d protested. I’d cut off a length of sash cord to tie to my ankle. To my ankle I tied it. Firmly. This, I considered, was my lifeline. This was the cord I thought I’d seen Joe tie to a steam-radiator. But he’d tied the other cord instead—and somehow I did not notice. It was an error on my part, and a singularly happy one.
But not at the moment. I hauled on the cord from my ankle instead of the one fastened—I didn’t know how inadequately—to my belt. The rope from my ankle was fastened only there. The other end came unresistingly as I pulled. The cut-off place came into the brownish-purple mist with me. And when I saw it, I knew a moment of such anguish as I would not wish even on you, my erstwhile rival and great-etc. Every hair on my head stood on end and cracked like a whiplash. My eyes bugged out. I was in a place that can only be described as nowhere. I wanted to get out. But I’d pulled into the hole with me what I thought was my only link to a world of schoolteachers, alcoholic cats and—Joe.
I felt a pure, hysterical aversion to the end of that cord. I hadn’t meant to pull it to where Joe couldn’t yank it back. I had. I had a frenzied impulse to return it to him. So I threw that cord hysterically away from me, into the puce-colored mist.
And it tickled you on the back of your neck.
This is the crucial moment, Charles. When you and Laki and Stan and Hari and of course Ginny stand in your cellar rumpus room, everybody will have read this narrative. But you, Charles, will be savagely determined to prove it sheer nonsense. And your friends have often displayed what you consider peculiar ideas of humor. When you have pointed out the conspicuous absence of anybody from an earlier age in the room, and are pointing out triumphantly to them that this story is all eyewash and that your great-great-etc.-grandfather is not going to visit you that morning from fourteen centuries previous. When you have done all that, Charles, the rope will tickle the back of your neck.